The Murder Hole (14 page)

“The stove in the galley,” Roger stated.
“Tracy says it’s been playing up. Acting up. She even mentioned it
to the guy who owns the boat. He ignored her, and now look what
happened.”

“Wasn’t it a propane stove?”

Roger stared at her as though she’d just
spoken in Elvish. “Yeah, that’s just the point. Leaking propane, a
spark from the equipment, boom.”

Either he hadn’t noticed the gasoline smell
or . . . Or what? She knew better than to trespass on Cameron’s
theories or his witnesses. If Roger wanted to indulge in denial,
prevarication, or both, all she could do was take note. She tried
an innocuous, “Maybe you can show me your remote-sensing equipment
some time.”

“Yeah, great. We’ll do that.” He tried to
grin and produced a ghastly grimace instead.

Brendan’s face was soberly downcast, his
cubical jaw tucked into his jacket collar like a box wrapped in
gift paper. Still, his eyes glinted warily as they looked from Jean
to the police car waiting at the top of the drive and back again.
She wondered if he was feeling guilty over—well, maybe no more than
his hasty words to Jonathan, or trading places . . .
Oh
. He
and Roger didn’t know Jonathan’s body had just turned up. She could
try telling them, and seeing what their reaction was. But Alasdair
would prefer doing that himself. He kept as tight a control of his
variables as his emotions.

“See you later,” Roger said, and accelerated
toward the house.

Jean inhaled the damp wind scented with the
slightly musty smell of the loch. What she had thought was some
emanation from the neighboring fields she now realized had been
Roger’s breath. Knocking back a few drinks was the time-honored
response to disaster, she told herself. He was entitled.

She walked briskly down the length of the
drive and onto the sidewalk that ran beside the main road. Since it
was also the shoulder of the road, she stayed as close to the
fence-lined side as she could—taking into account that some of the
leafy wonders filling the gully between asphalt and fence were
stinging nettles. This country was filled with an amazing variety
of prickly things. And people.
Go figure
.

The festival occupied a bumpy open field that
lay between the old hotel housing the Official Loch Ness
Exhibition—distinct from the Original Loch Ness Exhibition down the
road—and the new Cameron Arms Hotel. Jean paused a moment to admire
the contemporary building’s slate roof, stuccoed walls, and
crow-stepped gables, a design that recognized Scottish traditional
architecture without becoming the sort of “authenticity” that was
actually mockery.

A sudden pricking of her thumbs made her
first frown, then look quickly around and up. What the . . ? Ah,
Tracy Dempsey was framed in a large bay window on the second floor
of the hotel. She was staring down at Jean, her face set in
something between a scowl and a sob, like Medusa catching a glimpse
of herself in a mirror.

Tracy had every reason to be grief-stricken,
frustrated, angry—or all of the above. Just as Jean lifted her hand
in a sympathetic wave, a thin, tall silhouette wavered in the
window behind Tracy and she vanished as abruptly as though she’d
been jerked back by a rubber band.

Jean stood with her hand upraised. Had she
seen a second person in the room or had she been deceived by
Tracy’s reflection on the glass? If someone were there, it sure
wasn’t Roger, not unless during his explorations along the edge of
science he’d learned how to be in two places at once. As for who
was there—the body shape was Martin Hall’s—it was none of her
business.

Like that was going to stop her, Jean
thought.

She picked her way across the muddy patch
inside the gate of the Festival Field and up the hill. Flags
strained against their moorings, her hair whipped around her face,
and the fabric of the large central tent ran a swell like the water
of the loch. Technicians used lengths of cable to knit together
microphones, amplifiers, and mixer boards on the stage, while
vendors of food and souvenirs around the periphery were already
making sales to the gathering multitude. A wide selection of Starr
beverages was available, Jean noted, from water with caffeine or
vitamins, to beer and whiskey served up with warm scones, meat
pies, and other high-carb, high-grease selections. Festival food,
in other words.

A sensual fiddle melody rose and fell on the
wind, luring Jean to a smaller tent. She peeked through the flap.
Aha, this was the green room, furnished with chairs and provender
for the performers. Hugh Munro was sitting there dreamily sawing
away at a ballad, not that “sawing” was the right word for the
motion of his bow across the strings of his fiddle. It danced,
tracing arabesques in the air. Or, Jean thought in spite of
herself, it made love to the fiddle—connecting, receding,
connecting again. If words could barely describe the action of
making music, they failed utterly when it came to describing music
itself, emotion in sound. And like emotion, some music was
uplifting and some was painful.

Jean suspected Hugh wasn’t so much rehearsing
as—no, not amusing himself. He was breathing. For a musician,
business was pleasure and pleasure was business. Even historians
couldn’t quite say that.

Most of the time Hugh looked like Santa
Claus, polished bald head fringed by neatly-trimmed white hair,
apple cheeks fringed by a neatly-trimmed white beard, stomach
shaking with humor. Other times he morphed into Karl Marx, his
stomach shaking with indignation and his eyes flashing fiercely.
His protest songs were so stirring they would drive the most rabid
reactionary onto the barricades.

Now Hugh’s clear blue eyes beamed with
goodwill to man—and woman. He brought the song to a close and said,
“Here you are, then,” echoing Cameron’s statement.

“Here I am,” Jean returned, “in the thick of
it.”

Carefully Hugh tucked his fiddle into its
well-worn case and the case beneath his arm. “Your story’s blown up
on you again, has it? And aye, I’m intending the pun.”

“I don’t do these things on purpose,” she
told him with a sickly smile.

He bowed her out of the tent, patting her
shoulder reassuringly as she passed. “No, I’m not thinking you do.
I hear there’s a lad gone missing.”

“Not any longer. We–er–they found him just a
few minutes ago, floating in the loch.”

“I’m sorry,” said Hugh.

“Me, too,” Jean stated. “So where were you
when the boat went up?”

“The lads and I were unloading the bus.
Bloody thing broke down twice on the road from Dundee, we were
hours late arriving here. That flack from Starr looked to be having
a coronary.”

“Flack from Starr? A public relations
guy?”

“Oh aye, name of Peter Kettering. A right
ponce, scunnered I’d missed some sort of posh dinner with the
Tourist Authority folk. Carted me away for a drink with the VIPs,
including the American scientific chap and his wife. Mutton dressed
as lamb, she was, low-cut frock, ankle-breaking high heels. If
that’s not too unkind a cut.”

Jean thought,
there but for the grace of
common sense
. . . “I used to wear high heels all the time—when
you’re only five-three people don’t always take you seriously.
Tracy would be about that tall without her shoes, I bet. And she
wants to be taken seriously.”

“Don’t we all?” said Hugh. “Dempsey now, he
seems couthy enough, if a bit cracked. They were serving good
whiskey, thank the gods for small favors, but the conversation was
hopeless. Kettering and My Lady Dempsey were making talk so small
it was microscopic, all the while sniffing each other like dogs.
And Dempsey himself drank and looked about like an alien suddenly
set down on the earth.”

Jean grinned. She could see the entire
scene.

“A handsome young couple was there too,” he
went on. “Didn’t say much, though—never caught their names.”

“Did you catch their nationality?” Jean
asked, wondering if the Bouchards had attended the dinner.

“He was a Yank, whilst she had a Glasgow
accent, I’m thinking. Bonny lass, she was, and clever enough not to
go ruining her looks by painting her face.”

“Ah, that was Kirsty, Iris Mackintosh’s
niece. And Brendan, one of Dempsey’s assistants. The surviving
assistant, although Jonathan was still alive if this was before the
boat blew up.”
Unless someone killed him and staged the boat
explosion to cover up the murder
, whispered the insistent voice
in the back of Jean’s mind. Some people had muses, she had Miss
Marple.

“It was before the boat blew up,” Hugh said.
“Kettering marched us all away to hear the pipe band and view the
fireworks, and I escaped back to the bus in good time to see the
explosion. Bad business. No accident, I take it?”

“It might not be, no,” Jean said.

They stopped at the side of the pavilion,
Hugh looking over the proceedings with a critical eye that belied
his cherubic smile. “This Roger Dempsey chap, he’s ex-university
like yourself?”

“No, not really, although I first met him at
an academic conference. Basically he’s a businessman and engineer
with a yen for exploration. His companies build all sorts of
remote-sensing equipment.”

“Radar, sonar, and the like? It’s all a
mystery to me.”

“Me too, although I learned a little bit
about it when I was married to Brad. He was—well, he still is,
funny how you say was—a professor of mechanical engineering. Every
now and then he’d do some outside consulting, design work and such.
Once he actually paid good money to go down in a submersible and
see the
Titanic
. Me, I’d have stayed on the ship and watched
everything on a computer screen, via remote sensing equipment. But
that’s Brad, he has a taste for scientific inquiry as strong as
Roger’s, just a lot more . . .” She was wondering whether
“conventional” or “dull” was the right word, or whether she should
just drop the subject—the man was her private version of Marley’s
ghost—when she was interrupted by a male voice speaking in a
mouthful-of-marbles English accent.

“How are we getting on, then, Hugh?”

Jean looked around and up—the man was a head
taller than she was. His lean body wore a three-piece suit and
striped tie that might just as well have included a neon sign
flashing
I am important
. His hair was slicked back in stiff,
gelled strands, and his smile was broad, over-whitened teeth
seeming to melt together into a crescent of glare like oncoming
headlights.

“Hullo,” he said to Jean. “Peter Kettering,
Starr PLC.”

“Jean Fairbairn,
Great Scot
.”

“Ah,
Great Scot
, is it? I sent along a
press release about our new products, vitamin-enriched spring water
and low-carbohydrate beer.”

Hugh winced. As far as he was concerned, beer
was one of the basic food groups, not to be improved upon by
marketing departments. “Ah yes,” Jean said noncommittally. “Thank
you.”

“If you’ll excuse us, Jean,” Kettering went
on, “I’m needing a bit of a chin-wag with Hugh here.”

“Cheers,” said Hugh, and patiently suffered
Kettering’s hand on his arm steering him through the crowd toward
the stage.

Jean was beginning to miss how Alasdair had
called her “Miss Fairbairn” not only when they first met, but well
beyond. They’d gone through multiple alarms and excursions together
before they began using first names. Which, she thought, meant that
they were either out of touch with contemporary usage or wary of
even the most superficial intimacy.

Alasdair
. She could dawdle around all
day, but eventually she was going to have to go to the police
station and make her statement. The longer she stalled, the more
likely Sawyer would be there, too. On the other hand, the police
people would be dealing with Jonathan’s body for a while yet. After
lunch, she’d go after lunch.

She turned around and bounced off something
large and pleasantly soft. “Oops,” said Patti Duckett. “Sorry, I
was in your way.”

“No problem,” Jean replied. “I wasn’t
watching where I was going.”

Behind Patti, Dave was returning his wallet
to his pocket. “Great stuff they’ve got here.”

“Look what we found for the grandkids.” Patti
opened one of several plastic bags so that Jean could see inside.
It was filled with toys, from squeaky rubber Nessies to plush
stuffed ones, a long-haired Highland cow and a black-faced sheep
keeping them company.

Somewhere in China, Jean thought, a factory
was working overtime. “How many grandchildren do you have?” she
asked.

“Three,” said Patti, “Two boys and a
girl.”

“Do they live in Illinois, too?”

“They do now, yes. They were born in Florida
but they came back last year after they lost their father . .
.”

“Look,” Dave said, gazing toward the main
tent, “there are some guys in kilts. You’ll never get me in one of
those things. A bit breezy for my taste.”

Since Dave understandably didn’t want to
dwell on what might have been anything from a divorce to a tragedy,
Jean answered him, not Patti. “Scots are tough. Still, it’s not
surprising they go to Florida for winter vacations.”

Patti closed her bag of toys and peered into
another bag, this one holding a bright tartan blanket, but she
didn’t seem to be actually seeing it. “Have you heard anything more
about the boat blowing up? How about the boy who’s missing? A real
shame about him being caught in the explosion and everything.”

Might as well spread the word
. “They
found his body in the loch.”

“That’s a real shame,” Patti said once more,
her voice cracking.

“It sure is. Accidents happen, but sometimes
people can be damned careless . . .” Dave still stared into the
distance, the light reflecting off his glasses making them seem
opaque. “I guess no one knows what happened yet?”